Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [267]
Serving Brother des Roches, who had been standing over him, straightened, and seeing Sir Graham, strode over, in rueful relief. ‘It’s a shambles,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve done what I can, but they’re in no mood to be moderate. It was O’Connor’s wine.’
‘The sherry-sack?’ said Gabriel sharply. ‘I said they might share it, by which I meant one serving per man. I gave no orders that they should empty the wain-load down their throats.’
‘Then O’Connor and the rest didn’t understand, sir,’ said des Roches directly. ‘The belief was that they could finish it. They just about have.’
Gabriel’s examining gaze returned to the serving brother, and he smiled. ‘Children, aren’t they? Cunning and foolish at once. Let’s see what can be done with them.’ And, stepping again to his place, he collected a pewter wine-pot and with it, banged on the board.
All his life, des Roches and the few who were sober were to remember that talk as a faultless example of handling under adverse conditions. To begin with, Graham Malett hadn’t even silence to speak in. Shouts and drunken laughter interrupted the shifty apprehension of those still able to recognize him. Only, as the speaker went on, his voice deepening in force and anger, these died away, and he spoke into absolute quiet.
He began by telling them, dispassionately, that all that had happened that night would be reported to Lymond when he came back. They knew what that meant. They had no reason to complain. A supremely trained force such as theirs could neither operate successfully nor defend itself against others unless it accepted the severest standards of authority within itself. It seemed to him, said Gabriel, looking at the ruined tables, the stained and stinking floor, the rucked and spattered tapestries and the crooked flares, that like common soldiers they had gone about their work that day, content to grumble under orders, without any thought of the purpose behind it.
‘You,’ said Gabriel quietly, ‘are the many blades of the fine instrument we call St Mary’s. Called into being a year ago, a bodiless force, a secular force, no more than an idea in your leader’s mind, it has now become a company worthy of renown throughout Christendom.’ He described, in the waiting silence, some of the things they had done: their services to the countryside; those actions where they had succeeded best. He made no mention of their failures but stressed Lymond’s name, over and over again, as the man to whose vision and ability they would owe their great future.
It was the fault of no one, said Gabriel at length, that the Queen Mother had found it necessary to demand proof of their competence and their integrity. They possessed both. For a month, no longer, unless the work they had done together was to be wrecked, they must be seen to possess both. They must do exemplary work and lead exemplary lives and regard it, if they must, as penitence for past misdemeanours. ‘No one,’ said Gabriel, smiling a little at last, ‘is proposing to ask you to continue so unnaturally when your probation is over. Men who trade in danger and hardship find it less easy than others to resist sin, or I have found it so, and I accept it. I only suggest, for the sake of your own peace hereafter, that when you go with the Queen Mother’s army to France, you carry your sins, as you do to me, to someone you can trust, who will ease you of them. I would wish to think of you as gay and gallant and light-hearted as you should be now, with all these toys, these childish excesses, left behind.’
‘But you will be with us!’ said des Roches; and his startled words, unintentionally clear, rang through the hall.
Graham Malett looked down. ‘I—shall not be with you in France,’ he said gently. ‘Or afterwards. I am leaving St Mary’s.’
There was a surge of motion. Afterwards, Plummer, watching squint-eyed, remembered it as the breaking of a long, sullen roller, pouring ashore, to stub all its length on a reef. Gabriel stilled the commotion with one hand. ‘I know. St Mary’s has become a part of my life as it